Book No Excuses

[Vennie Fireman]

Excusesstunt our growth. When we make excuses, we tend to convince ourselves that we could not have changed the outcome, and therefore have no need to adapt for the future. Failure becomes easier to accept in ourselves, and we never grow beyond our current state.

In both of these scenarios, there are reasons that were inside of my control and outside of my control that played a role in my failure. I set myself up for failure through my decisions and behaviors.

When we make excuses, we are usually focused on everything and everyone else but ourselves. If we are unwilling take responsibility for our behaviors and our decisions that contributed to the failure, we are making excuses and failing to grow in character.

The good news is habits are changed one decision at a time. We can decide to own up to our role in a failure and start a new habit. It is up to us to decide to take responsibility and grow or to shift blame and stagnate.

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This happens to even the best of us. You know that you should be working on a certain project or habit. You know it will lead to something better. But somehow, you find ways to delay the process and keep wondering in your comfort zone.

Now that you have noticed that most of your excuses come in the form of poor time management. The best place to start is making more accurate time estimates and tracking your every minute. Once you do this, here are some positive changes that you will experience.

How have excuses killed your chances of success? Do you think better time management can help you stop making excuses and getting results in life? Leave a comment and share your thoughts in the section below.

This is when you look for easy options, people to blame, and more often than not you place people around you who support your habit, they feed it. This is the worst. Parents, coaches, tennis fitness trainers, or friends supporting excuses actually push players away from their hopes and dreams and help nobody.

In my opinion, this is a complex issue, and with that comes the process of getting it right. More of a process than I can get you through in a short blog. When we spend time with our online clients these are some of the issues we highlight and get them through. If you want to become one of the players that get education and support from our team click here and let us know how we can help you.

Most district courts offer permanent excuses from service, on individual request, to designated groups of persons or occupational class on grounds that service by such class or group would entail undue hardship or extreme inconvenience to the members thereof. Such groups may include persons over age 70; persons who have, within the past two years, served on a federal jury; and persons who serve as volunteer firefighters or members of a rescue squad or ambulance crew.

Excuses for jurors are granted at the discretion of the court and cannot be reviewed or appealed to Congress or any other entity. Each of the 94 federal district courts maintains its own jury procedures and policies regarding excuses from jury service. Contact the federal court where you were selected to ask about a temporary deferral or excusal from service.

Yes. The idea is to resocialize the children into new goals and behaviors. They do this by scripting the moves, as the book is titled. Here are some examples: Students had to arrive at school at 7:30 a.m. There was no transportation provided, so parents had to be able to drive or walk their students to school. If you did not arrive at 7:30, your student got a same-day detention. My children would have gotten lots of detentions, because we are late to school a lot. Then, students had to file through the hallways in silent, straight, forward-facing lines. There was no recess. There were no lockers. Even gym began with silent reading. As you can tell, the school was very structured.

The principal was white. One of the school leaders was a Black woman, and the founder of the school was a Black man. But by and large, in no-excuses schools, you do see a mostly white teaching and leadership staff.

I think they must not have been aware. She was very idealistic. She had come into this school not to be a disciplinarian, and had ended up doing discipline most of the day. There was a dissonance between what she was doing and what she wanted to do and was hoping to do at that school.

These are all ridiculous. If you look at readily-available, easy to interpret evidence, you can see that they are completely invalid excuses, and cannot possibly be good reasons to shut down an argument about performance.

But a situation that sometimes happens does not support the use of a statement as a blanket excuse. For these to be valid excuses that relegate performance to an esoteric concern, they must be true in the common case. They must be true a priori, as things you can know about software in general before you have actually investigated the performance of a particular product or practice.

And the available evidence clearly demonstrates that these excuses are not true in general. To see this, all you have to do is look at the track record of successful software companies. If you do, it immediately becomes clear that none of these things could have been accurate statements about their projects.

For example, take Facebook. It's a huge company. It employs tens of thousands of software developers. It's one of the most valuable corporations on planet earth. And importantly, for our purposes, they are fairly open about what they're doing and how their software development is going. We can easily look back and see what happened to their software projects over the past decade.

Cutting back on cookies required a few engineering tricks but was pretty straightforward; over six months we reduced the average cookie bytes per request by 42% (before gzip). To reduce HTML and CSS, our engineers developed a new library of reusable components (built on top of XHP) that would form the building blocks of all our pages.

In 2018, Facebook published a paper describing how improving the performance of PHP and Hack became a priority for them, and they had to create increasingly more complicated compilers to get their code to run faster:

Engineering experience improvements and user experience improvements must go hand in hand, and performance and accessibility cannot be viewed as a tax on shipping features. With great APIs, tools, and automation, we can help engineers move faster and ship better, more performant code at the same time. The work done to improve performance for the new Facebook.com was extensive and we expect to share more on this work soon.

Prior to the decision to rewrite the compiler, the time it took to compile all of the queries in our codebase was gradually, but unrelentingly, slowing as our codebase grew. Our ability to eke out performance gains could not keep up with the growth in the number of queries in our codebase, and we saw no incremental way out of this predicament.

The rollout was smooth, with no interruptions to application development. Initial internal benchmarks indicated that the compiler performed nearly 5x better on average, and nearly 7x better at P95. We've further improved the performance of the compiler since then.

How are people still taking these excuses seriously? There is no way to explain the behavior of even just this one company, let alone the rest of the industry, if you somehow believe one of these excuses.

Well, I suppose one way to keep believing one of these excuses is to believe that Facebook is unique. That they alone are so unwise, untalented, or unlucky as to have these performance problems, but no one else would.

They changed their backend from MySQL to a real-time version of Lucene and replaced Ruby-on-Rails with a custom-built Java server called Blender, all for the stated reason of improving search performance.

In the same year, they also announced extensive optimizations to their front-end, which required undoing a bunch of architecture decisions they had made two years prior which proved to be bad for performance:

Apparently they had written the entire thing in Python only to find that Python was too slow. They then had to completely rewrite all the worker nodes in Go for no reason other than to increase performance.

During that same time period, Uber was apparently rewriting their entire iOS application in Swift. This harrowing thread from December, 2020 details the series of development disasters caused by that decision:

With so much evidence refuting the five excuses, hopefully it is clear that they are ridiculous. They are completely invalid reasons for the average developer, in the common case, to dismiss concerns about software performance. They should not be taken seriously in a professional software development context.

In fact, when considered as a whole, the last two decades would seem to show exactly the opposite of what excuse-makers typically claim. Software performance appears to be central to long-term business interests. Companies are claiming their own data shows that performance directly affects the financial success of their products. Entire roadmaps are being upended by ground-up performance rewrites. Far from what the excuses imply, the logical conclusion would be that programmers need to take performance more seriously than they have been, not less!

Although it does take some time to learn the skills necessary to make good performance decisions, nowadays it is a very achievable goal. It does not take several years of hand-writing assembly code like it used to. Learning basic performance-aware programming skills is something a developer can do in months rather than years.

In a 40-hours work week filled with depressing code-related absurdities, I can always hop on here for a quick dose of dopamine and a reminder that things can, and should, be better - and that I'm not crazy for thinking that.

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